Wilhelm Georg Joseph Stuckart (16 November 1902 – 15 November 1953) was a German Nazi Party lawyer, official, and a State Secretary in the Reich Interior Ministry during the Nazi era. He was a co-author of the Nuremberg Laws and a participant in the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the genocidal Final Solution to the Jewish Question was planned. He also served as Reichsminister of the Interior in the short-lived Flensburg government at the end of the Second World War.

After the War he was tried in the Ministries Trial, but received no additional sentence, due to a lack of evidence. Stuckart then worked as a minor civil servant, until his death in a car accident.

Early life

Stuckart was born in Wiesbaden, the son of a railway employee. He had a Christian upbringing. Stuckart was active in the far right early on and joined the Freikorps von Epp in 1919 to resist the French occupation of the Ruhr.

Career

From 1930, Stuckart served as a district court judge. On 4 April 1933 he became the Mayor and State Commissioner in Stettin and was also elected to the state parliament and the Prussian State Council.

On 7 July 1934, Stuckart became the State Secretary and head of the Central Office in the recently established Reich Ministry of Science, Education and Culture under Bernhard Rust. However, after disagreements with his superior, he was placed on leave for disobedience in September and was involuntarily retired on 14 November 1934. He moved to Darmstadt, where he worked from February to March 1935 as the president of the superior district court. In 1936, Stuckart became a member of the Academy for German Law and chairman of its committee on administrative law.

Part of Stuckart's duties in the Interior Ministry involved providing a legal framework justifying the Nazi expansionist policy under constitutional and international law. On 16 March 1938, Hitler charged him with the management of the office carrying out the unification of Austria with the Reich, and he drafted the implementing decree. He was formally promoted to State Secretary in the Interior Ministry on 1 April 1938. In October, he was similarly charged with administering the transfer of the Sudetenland and, in March 1939, drafted the decree on the formation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

On 18 August 1939, Stuckart signed a confidential decree regarding the "Reporting Obligations of Deformed Newborns," which became the basis for the Nazi regime's euthanasia of children. Two years later, Stuckart's own one-year-old son, Gunther, who was born with Down syndrome, became a victim of this programme.

Stuckart was a member of the SA from 1932 and applied for membership in the SS in December 1933. On the recommendation of Heinrich Himmler, Stuckart finally transferred to the SS on 13 September 1936 (member number 280,042) with the rank of SS-Standartenführer. He was awarded the Golden Party Badge on 30 January 1939 and was promoted to the rank of SS-Obergruppenführer on 30 January 1944.

A prolific writer, Stuckart came to be seen as one of the leading Nazi legal experts, focusing especially on racial laws and public administration. In 1936 Stuckart, as the chairman of the Reich Committee for the Protection of German Blood, The commentary explains that the laws were based on the concept of Volksgemeinschaft ("People's community") to which every German was bound by common blood. Stuckart and his disciples distinguished (administrative mastery) from an idealised (leadership).

The transformation of the state administration from a technical apparatus for the application of norms to a means of political leadership was the central idea in Stuckart's model: the ideal Nazi civil servant was not to be a passive lawyer of the obsolete "liberal constitutional state", but a "pioneer of culture, coloniser and political and economic creator". The document presents a plan to weaken France by reducing the country to its late mediaeval borders with the Holy Roman Empire and replacing the French populace of the annexed territories by German settlers.) drawn in the occupied French territories after the Second Armistice at Compiègne, which stretched from the mouth of the River Somme to the Jura Mountains (see map). Historian Peter Schöttler refers to this plan as a western equivalent of the Generalplan Ost.

Heydrich called a follow-up conference on 6 March 1942, which further discussed the problems of "mixed blood" individuals and mixed marriage couples. At this meeting, Stuckart argued that only first-degree Mischlinge (persons with two Jewish grandparents) should be sterilized by force, after which they should be allowed to remain in Germany and undergo a "natural extinction". He had stated:

<blockquote>I have always maintained that it is extraordinarily dangerous to send German blood to the opposing side. Our adversaries will put the desirable characteristics of this blood to good use. Once the half Jews are outside of Germany, their high intelligence and education level, combined with their German heredity, will render these individuals born leaders and terrible enemies. When that government was dissolved by the Allies, Stuckart was arrested on 23 May, interned in Camp Ashcan and called as an expert witness at the Nuremberg trial of Wilhelm Frick. He himself was tried by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal in the Ministries Trial in 1948 for his role in formulating and carrying out anti-Jewish laws. The court characterized him as an ardent Jew-hater who was able to pursue his anti-Semitic campaign from the safety of his ministerial office. In 1951, he was tried in a de-Nazification court, classified as a "fellow traveller" (Mitläufer) and fined five hundred Deutsche Mark.